New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light
bbc.com
bbc.com
Development is going forward under the UK SMR Consortium (Rolls Royce, NAMRC, NNL and a few others) and there is quite a lot of buzz in the UK's civil nuclear industry at the moment.
Some further reading for the interested:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/advanced-nuclear-...
https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/sm...
About the current cost of the different type of energy: https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-o... (please note that capacity factor would be different according to the country, for example renewable energy would be more expensive in France than is this document)
It does not seems wise to bet that SMR will be cheaper than renewable in 10 to 20 years and wait and pray...
SMR is not a viable option right now. That is an interesting possibility we should study and work on, that could be a good surprise later on, but right now 1) it is not ready 2) we don't know if it will be cost competitive... Putting aside nuclear risks and radioactive waste problem (that are minimized by SMR)
The cost of solar and wind energy when the sun shines or the wind blows has certainly decreased a lot in recent years, you're right about that.
But decreasing cost of managing intermittence? I haven't heard of any big recent advances in that (aside from the successful use in Australia of batteries to damp fluctuations on a timescale of minutes, which is great but doesn't address timescales of hours to months). What am I missing?
They're still not cheap enough to make solar + batteries price-competitive in most markets, but their cost absolutely has been decreasing fast.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/04/powering-the-ev-revolut...
Needing "several orders of magnitude" improvement is also pessimistic. There are installations that are borderline economically profitable right now (Tesla battery farm in South Australia): another factor of 5 or 10 makes those attractive in many more places.
When it comes to technology at pilot scale, price and capacity improvement may turn out to never be realized... But there are dozens of promising tech, so it seems unlikely that all tech will "fail"... and SMR exhibit higer level of risk cause it is even not at the pilot scale project, and it is mostly one technology (with 2 or 3 varieties)
And there are many more tech at the lab stage
And there is also thermal storage, with many proven and cheap technology, and many different innovation at different stage in the pipe
And there are all the innovation to reduce the intermittence and help manage it
And there are all the innovation and intervention to allow to make energy demand more flexible
Battery prices are dropping but the easy low-hanging fruit has been plucked so now the rate of price decline is dropping -- 83% last decade but only 33% predicted over next five years. Production is also a long way off from where it would need to be. There are a couple of GWh plants coming online, but that is still only a fraction of what is needed if battery is going to scale up to handle grid storage.
Lots of hand-waving examples you have there, very little in production. A more likely long-term outcome will be to push the storage burden on to the renewable production plants -- only accept power from a producer at a rate they can provide over the next 24 hours with the grid only needing a small surge capacity built into it to smooth out demand spikes.
About storage tech working now, you forgot possibly the most used right know and the cheapest one: thermal storage (giving up to 9,000MW to the French grid for example!). With a huge and cheap potential and mature cheap tech.
Firstly, better capacity factor for onshore wind, offshore wind becoming cost competitive and the emergence of floating offshore wind reduce a bit the intermittence, then the cost of managing it
Secondly renewable is becoming so cheap that installing more than peak demand and setting up curtailment is cost competitive and reduces the intermittence and the cost of managing it. There are also solar project not optimizing for maximum production, but for producing when needed.
Solar-plus-storage is becoming more and more common for new project, with cost falling. Generally all the batteries cost are in free fall while we are just at the beginning of the market expansion: massive economy of scale are on the way, with proven technologies
More electrical storage are coming... Flow batteries, pumped hydro on isolated reservoir (eg Gordon Butte), liquid air, underground compressed air, stacked blocs, hydrogen... And there are many other tech in the lab at the same level development of SMR. Of course all the promising tech wont be a success or be cost competitive, but with SMR you bet on one tech, here you bet on more than a dozen tech.
Virtual Power plant and Demand-response project and market are blooming (and that is a start)...
This last point open a wider market for thermal storage, with existing cheap and mature technologies, and many developing project (relatively low tech) like inter seasonal heat or cold storage
Also a 10x cost improvement on nuclear would blow everything else away (in a good way). I don't think renewables have the same potential - for one thing, they're a more mature technology (weird, I know, but they've been the focus of global development for quite some time now).
And also there's only so much energy you can get out of solar and wind - you just can't get more than 1.3 kw from a square meter of solar, you have to cover more square meters. On the other hand there's no theoretical reason why you wouldn't have a clean, safe reactor in each car. It's just a technological challenge.
So far, it is obviously not sustainable to finance nuclear power plants from the electricity they produce. In other words, they are not even viable as a business.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/14/new-uk-n...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091
https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...
This should significantly reduce construction risk, as you have an experienced team who already understand how to build the thing.
(Going with 3.75% rule instead of usual 4% rule so you have a safety margin.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos...
Areva, responsible for the construction of Olkiluoto-3 in Finland on a fixed price contract. Restructured and sold all of it's reactor business except Olkiluoto-3, which it still is liable for, to EDF.
For Hinkley, EDF have assumed the construction risk in return for an exceptionally high, guaranteed "strike price" for the electricity it produces.
But for Sizewell, it sounds like a different finance arrangement will be in place, likely where the UK government/public assumes more of the risk in return for a cheaper per-MWh price.
Construction started in 2007, with estimated completion in 2012 at a cost of €3.3 billion.
As of 2020, the plant is still not complete and the cost has spiralled to €19.1 billion. It is now tentatively planned to go online at the end of 2022.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/inves...
Reviving the nuclear industry will be painful and costly, but the same is true for reviving and rehabilitating other heavy industries that have withered away, if and when these countries ever choose to do so. The justifications for resolving ourselves to their death are hypocritical. Both solar and wind power manufacturing industries, not to mention the automobile industry, would be non-existent in the U.S. without heavy subsidies. For example, special trade zones that incentive partial manufacturing of certain wind generator components in the U.S., or in the case of automobiles flat-out quotas. But even then the future of these industries in the U.S. remain tenuous. Fortunately for consumers (but less so for semi-skilled and skilled factory labor), solar panels, wind generators, and cars are easily imported; nuclear plants not so much, not unless the modular reactor designs take off.[1]
[1] Interestingly, the skillsets, including project management techniques, for these industries can't be imported, either. Toshiba bought Westinghouse because they thought they could use their superior heavy industry skills to rehabilitate Westinghouse and the American nuclear industry. But heavy industry skillsets are especially tuned to local industrial supply chains and labor pools, as well as domestic regulatory frameworks. Toshiba couldn't do squat with Westinghouse; it was deadweight from day 1.
[1] Fukushima being an obvious example. I'm neither an engineer nor nuclear cynic, but I was always skeptical of the claims nuclear engineers were making on the news in their self-defensive and, ultimately, self-defeating attempts to mitigate panic. They were far too credulous of engineering tolerances and quality control despite the evidence piling up in front of them regarding the probability of the supposedly improbable. Anyone remotely familiar with any kind of construction project knows things always fall short in the field.
I am hopeful about the new crop of companies currently designing SMRs. This was probably the way it should have been done from the onset, rather than pushing single unit power to hundreds of gigawatts.
I only began recording in 2018 particularly noteworthy reporting and research pieces (regarding any topic) I stumble upon. I just added the above to my personal bibliography for good measure.
Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions.
If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively wind farm to charge them, and have enough capacity to carry through any weather, then cheaper is better. If someone can more cheaply drill into the earth core and use thermal heat (an other promising technology) then great!
If the whole UK energy grid could become fossil free, and the only cost would be a 2x increase in costs, then that would be to me a fair price to pay. It is costly, and by the look from the private companies involved a bit financially risky, but continuing burning fossil fuels is bad enough that all alternatives should be used until the last fossil fueled power plant get demolished.
China's emissions are approximately double the US's and growing.
China's population is 1.4 billion compared to 330 million for the US though. Surely you should be comparing this relative to population size (China is four times bigger) and countries with smaller emissions per person should be recognised as doing well?
Part of the reason for the gap in nuclear construction in recent years, separate from Fukushima, seems to have been growing trade tensions with the U.S. Now that construction and approvals have resumed, it seems like China has decided to ditch almost all foreign designs and only build their "homegrown" AP1000 derivative. Unlike American politicians, Chinese politicians haven't forgotten the art of turning lemons into lemonade. Nuclear, solar, electric cars--they're using the transition to bolster and develop their industrial sectors. As countries should be making many of these investments anyhow to hedge and supplement the often myopic and short-sighted pursuits of the free market, the net costs to abandoning the fossil fuel economy can be significantly reduced. (In retrospect the contracts for American nuclear plants were probably handouts, anyhow, intended to mitigate balance of trade tensions. But with all goodwill having been burned to ash by the current administration, not to mention the collapse of the American nuclear construction industry, it became a pointless gesture.)
The earth has a carrying capacity, locally, regionally and globally, and a high population density does nothing to increase it.
That's a fascinating proposal.
I don't think that will be particularly favorable to the US, though. There are 195 countries in the world, yet the US accounts for 14% of all of the world's emissions.
Country borders mean nothing to the planet in ecological terms. How about looking at emissions per square kilometer as a target, but focusing treaty efforts on the largest CO2 emitting countries (or coalitions of countries that can be dealt with as a block)?
Capping emissions per capita accomplishes just that. Why are you so opposed to it?
> How about looking at emissions per square kilometer as a target
So, Canada (Population 38 million) should get to pollute three times more, in absolute values than India (Population 1.35 billion), because it has three times the land area?
> Country borders mean nothing to the planet in ecological terms.
Country borders don't mean anything to the planet, but they mean everything to how we must solve this problem.
People need energy to live.
The world has a limited carbon budget.
Distributing it equally, per capita is the least you can do to be fair about it. (In order to actually be fair about it, you must also count historic emissions, which means that the western world has long blown its share of that budget.)
It's not that Canada "should get to" pollute more than India. Canada can pollute more than India and still have the effects absorbed by its environment. Canada has vast forests absorbing CO2 on a scale sufficient to mostly counteract the harmful effects caused by its relatively sparse population. India doesn't have those vast forests, and its population is enormous.
I'm making no claim that it should be this way. It is this way.
Despite emitting more CO2 per capita, Canada is putting a negligible strain on the planet compared to India, the US, or especially China.
Who bothers, the US already wants one. Why should the EU let determine the future of the planet by some political backwater?
This should include embodied energy, or "gray energy", in materials like steel, aluminum and cement.
2020 will very likely be the first year that renewables overtake fossil fuels in total electricity generated.
Here's a satisfying video of UK coal-fired power plants being demolished: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-52985841
Maybe it won’t be a lot once built, but fuel extraction and processing are energy intensive. Also, 10 years of construction and the vast quantity of steel and concrete are going to burn one hell of a lot of fossil fuel.
It would be interesting to compare the lifetime fossil fuel usage of all power generators, including construction and disposal (and waste storage).
Also instructive to keep in mind just how energy dense nuclear fuel is. [2]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-to...
The sibling post seems to indicate otherwise though and mentions they're about the same? Any idea where that difference in numbers come from?
We think of “energy invested” as having an environmental cost, and of course that’s true when it comes from polluting fossil sources.
But as grids get cleaner, and transport vehicles and construction equipment are electrified, this is no longer such a concern. Eventually we’re just using clean energy to build more clean energy - a virtuous cycle!
New low-carbon concrete formulas and steel production technology are also needed, of course, since these are a major source of emissions whether for a nuclear plant or wind farm.
Then, why is it not economically viable when fairly competing with solar and wind energy? Because it requires much more subsidies and nuclear developers cannot even bear the financial risks of their projects, as one would expect from a economically viable technology.
Source: IPCC, 2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
What is the cost of an offshore generation plant that can produce power with the same reliability of a nuclear one? This needs to get into the equation.
I gave it a quick look, but frankly it would take me a lot of time to check if the model and assumptions make sense (it also seems to reply "job failed" whenever it doesn't have a cached answer). But I think real costs can be estimated only from working plants. Do we have, now, renewable energy plants that are capable of delivering a constant amount of energy by storing the excess production? How many have been built around the world? Why aren't we building more if they're so cheap?
They have plenty of drawbacks, but hydro meets this. The storage occurs pre production though.
As long as we are burning fossil fuels (and in particular natural gas) it doesn't make much sense to build such things, even if we could. The natural gas provides pre-stored energy.
If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if given enough funding.
Wikipedia says "The potential for further practical and viable hydroelectricity power stations in the UK is estimated to be in the region of 146 to 248 MW for England and Wales,[4] and up to 2,593 MW for Scotland.[5] However, by the nature of the remote and rugged geographic locations of some of these potential sites, in national parks or other areas of outstanding natural beauty, it is likely that environmental concerns would mean that many of them would be deemed unsuitable, or could not be developed to their full theoretical potential." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United...
Pumped-hydro storage doesn't need existing water, but the national grid averages 30GW and peaks at 40GW ( http://grid.iamkate.com/ ) are there enough places to build "a ton of pumped hydro" for that kind of size which are suitable for the above criteria as well?
And you can store energy as heat or cold, which is easier and cheaper, with a bigger potential
And you can have an impact on the demand side, with energy efficiency and demand-response
We keep thinking of "building renewable power" as "we can produce this amount of watts at peak". What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7". There is a big difference. We're ending up in a situation where we can "build renewable power at a fraction of the price" for half of the time. For the other half we rely on fossil fuels but we don't see the issue because we're focused on the amount of clean watts we get at peak.
There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables, which is why they continue to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more production shifts in that direction.
Thankfully prices are falling, efficiency improving, and massive battery factories are planned. The growth of EV means that will continue. Peaker plants are already being replaced with batteries.
> Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro
Nope. There is large pumped storage being built in Scotland right now and there are hundreds more glens where it would be feasible.
>There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables
Just as one example that may well magic away these problems, grid attached storage in the form of electric cars and home storage is growing massively right now. It may be we rethink entirely our centralised approach to production and storage.
Fission is expensive, centralised and carries heavy decommissioning costs and extreme tail risks. Fusion may someday give renewables a worthy rival but till then the falling prices mean nuclear has had its day.
Even if every battery production facility on the planet was dedicated entirely to producing storage batteries for the UK it would take almost half a decade to meet the requirements. You can claim that more will be built, but there are resource pipelines involved that are not as elastic and just throwing a pile of money at someone to build a factory. Battery production is growing, but nowhere near fast enough to meet the requirements for grid scale storage.
Right now fission has no competition from renewables+storage because the storage part of that equation remains a fantasy.
They don't get to use natural gas as a backup. They also need to be held liable to maintain the minimum capacity just as effective as more expensive solutions, but if they are willing and able to do that cheaper then they should win the bid and we should let them deliver carbon-free energy.
Humans have always adapted to power being available in different quantities and forms over time. This is why we have corn stores, mills, corned beef, and cold houses. No farmer expects that the sun makes his corn grow in January. In the end, we adapt to our environment, and we have done that though all the ages. Today, we can make it technically much smarter, for example by adding a price signal to electricity, and generating hot water for doing laundry during strong-wind night hours. If this is cheaper and more efficient than battery storage, then why not do it?
No thanks. Continuing burning fossil fuels until a better solution exist is not going to work. Climate change is already causing long term damage on a global scale, causing species to go extinct, raises water levels, expands deserts, displaces people, and is a problem that need to be taken serious. No waiting for a future technology yet undiscovered.
If we stop building new fossil fuel plants and only build nuclear and renewable, then maybe in 20-30 years we will reach a zero carbon energy grid. Given some of the most optimistic research, that might give us a small chance in prevent global crisis. A small chance. Continuing to burn gas until we have something better developed will rob us of that small chance. A 2x cost in energy, while somewhat costly, is still small cost compared to the consequences long term if we continue to burn fossil fuels.
A large number of people would die as a result of such a policy. Fuel poverty is already a significant problem, the UK government gives out 'winter fuel payment' benefits to some, but doubling the price of energy would push a lot of elderly, infirm, and poor people to stop heating their homes.
This idea would need to come with nationalised energy costs for it to work.
2x increase in cost doens't necessarily directly translate to doubling the price for everyone. For example it could be coupled with a scheme where consuming way above average makes the part which is above much more expensive, depending on income, to yield the ones consuming less and/or low income not having to pay double. Plus taxing overconsumption could be an incentive to getting rid of some needless energy usage.
Besides, very soon all new construction in the UK will be required to be heated exclusively by electricity, so for new housing heating costs will be absolutely huge compared to gas.
I'm still interested in doing it though because it would massively simplify the heating system. Removing gas from the system would mean I could do all the regular maintenance by myself whereas at present I'm obliged to use a registered, gas-trained plumber on the boiler itself because the law requires it.
Also, I think the idea would be to install an air source heat pump rather than resistive electrical heating.
Isn't it more nuanced than that? Don't know UK rules, but since you mention new housing: aren't these required to adhere to some minimum of insulation, likewise for renovations, thereby drastically reducing the energy required in the first place (I mean if I just compare our renovated house with my parent's, energy requirement is 4 to 5 times less per square m)? Moreover depending on climate, cost to produce a given amount of energy is lower for heta pumps than for gas?
Again, that's just anecdote, feel free to ignore it.
So the situation might be different elsewhere, but in Germany, poor consumers pay for Energiewende plus subsidies.
They've already doubled.
Now, of course this is more complex because some of that price rise is due to "levies" being placed to support both "green" initiatives and support for the vulnerable.
Its a fucking stupid project that was signed to make a political point. Instead of thinking about the needs of the next 100 years, it was signed to fulfill a short term political goal.
The government were over a barrel, the people making the contract knew it, and the government signed anyway.
It would also push adoption of non-fossil energy sources, since poor people have more than enough incentives to chose the economically best solution for them.
Also, it will be much too late to avoid massive climate change so its a bit mute. And that's assuming we also cut all our other emissions and every other country on earth cuts theirs...
Plus "no matter what the cost" is a pretty weird attitude if you don't mind me saying. If we can save more carbon by spending the same money elsewhere, shouldn't we do that instead?
1. Introduce a substantial carbon tax on extraction and import of any fossil energy source. This should include embodied energy, like aluminum.
2. Pay back part of the tax gains to the poorer population in form of a universal basic income (it could be some other scheme but I think this is the best one).
3. Subsidize any form of non-fossil energy generation, INCLUDING STORAGE, from the carbon tax. This subsidy MUST be non-discriminatory, it must not depend on promised future efficiencies in a technology but what it actually delivers, today. And it must give incentive to make any technology, and also energy distribution, consumption and storage, more efficient. It could be, for example, night time storage heaters (which were heavily promoted in the 1950s / 1960s to make nuclear more economical).
What we should NOT do is to subsidize some technology which has been making fancy promises since five decades, without really delivering them. Among other things, this would be market distortion, and precisely because it would reduce our effectiveness in fighting climate change, it would be very harmful. At worst, it would result in that we do effectively nothing, while pretending we do.
The reason why is important though. Is it because of:
1) Political issues, where the government has set up incentives for the builder to lie?
2) Social issues, where environmentalists attack the project to drive up costs?
It seems unbelievable to me that nuclear plant planners are unable to plan because ... dunno, maybe they hear nuclear and lose the ability to add numbers. There has to be something else going on. Planning is relatively easy once there are 1-2 historical projects to look at.
My experience with energy markets is governments proactively screw them up for reasons I cannot discern. For some reason guaranteed profits is a common standard in Australia which for the life of me I do not understand. Which idiot thinks that is clever? The UK might be doing something similarly stupid.
Every manufactured object has an insanely long and convoluted dependency chain, where each link is subject to disappearance due to factors completely out of your control. Especially objects that require special or unusual parts.
Then there's actually building the thing, which can go wrong for a million reasons before you've even reached the grand and rolling lands of human error.
"However, the BBC understands that the fact Sizewell C is a carbon copy of Hinkley - which has seen work on a second reactor there completed 30% more quickly than the first - is thought to have substantially mitigated that risk."
It sounds like it should be pretty easy to budget for this plant. Plans are allowed to include a 20% "we don't know what this is going to be spent on but something will come up" for surprises.
And yet, renewable projects typically come in within 10% of the contracted price.
The modular nature of renewables also allows them to be much more resilient in the face of component failure, or in face of construction errors (with the exception of common mode design failures). This means they can be installed with less skilled labor that makes more mistakes.
Renewable fields are akin to server farms w. large numbers of replaceable blades. Nuclear plants are like mainframes.
Reading some of Jeremy Leggett's analysis of nuclear in the region, notably Flamanville and Hinkley, is highly enlightening.
From inability to plan or produce sufficiently high quality components, and then challenges getting them into place without damaging them, low quality work being undertaken in the construction process [1], government hiding details of contractual arrangements, a consistent (and predicted) drop in the price of power before and through the lives of these projects, industry players being painted into a corner where they must [try to] grow their business despite the above [2], combined with a surfeit of hubris all round.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/10/edf-warns-o...
[2] https://jeremyleggett.net/2016/06/03/the-nuclear-white-eleph...
[1] https://omegataupodcast.net/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and-wh...
You have literally nothing in your hands but it still won't stop you from blaming the government (which blindly throws money on it) and "environmentalists" (which obviously failed or those projects would not have started).
This is hilarious.
It's quite sad to see the lack of innovation in western countries around the build and development of nuclear power plants. Red tape, regulation and lack of political will (due to unfavourable views on nuclear technology) will continue to see most countries fall behind on this.
It's really quite sad. Nuclear has a negative connotation to most but it's the future. Interstellar space travel will rely on the nuclear technology that should be worked on today.
I reason that we should be building and developing these technologies now rather than continuing to rely on burning carbon based fuels to power our homes. The technology is there. The will is not.
Sadly, too many dummies keep on pandering on about how it's dangerous which in turn, drives up cost - then other dummies come along and say "Oh it is too expensive", without understanding the first group of people that drove the cost up to begin with.
Red tape is invariably written in innocent victims' blood. And "regulation" is not a bogeyman.
But for a complex problem like this, I assure you there are no simple explanations - but people always seem to want simple explanations. That disappoints me.
So even the company with a financial incentive to under-estimate the cost is saying that the electricity it produces will be at best as expensive as wind energy already is.
Of course nuclear power plants can still generate electricity on a windless day, but if they're only used on such days, then the cost per Joule is even worse.
Perhaps the (estimated) £20 billion could be spent on energy storage projects like Vehicle-to-Grid distribution or hydrogen generation, which should be even more competitive 10 years from now when this power plant is supposed to start operating.
... And be low-carbon (~10gCO2/kWh). Whereas the £40/MWh estimate for wind included gas power generation, which is at 400gCO2/kWh. Given how wind has a typical load factor of 20-30% max in Western Europe, you’d be using gas at best 70% of the time, meaning an average carbon intensity perhaps around 300gCO2/kWh.
So for the same price (or even double that as a first step - nuclear costs decrease radically with lower risks perceived by investors), nuclear gets you > 30x less carbon in the atmosphere than wind+gas. That is not insignificant.
> they're only used on such days, then the cost per Joule is even worse.
Nuclear isn’t like gas: it is fixed-costs infrastructure, meaning that the more you use it, cheaper it gets. So you want to use it as much as possible. (French nuclear plants oscillate between 75% and 90% load depending on maintenance schedules.) So on a windy day, nuclear load won’t typically change too much, but rather gas and coal usage will go down to let wind electricity match up with demand. This means nuclear gets you less emissions even in that case.
No, they're totally separate things. It's not "wind and gas" as a single entity, it's "wind farms supply power to the grid at £40/MWh and gas plants also provide power to the grid at £40/MWh". In other words, it just means they cost about the same which is half the cost of nuclear. There is no 30/70 split as you imagined.
Which makes sense. Scotland gets around 90% of it's electricity from renewables, of which around 70% is wind power. It couldn't possibly do that if your figures were correct.
My point was to address the idea that nuclear is too costly as a long term solution, which I think (?) OP was using that cost/MWh comparison to intent.
FTR though, I do appreciate that gas + renewables can be a nice transition strategy (like the UK seems to have done to eradicate coal).
> There is no 30/70 split as you imagined.
It seems you understood I was talking about a 30/70 split in cost. That is not what I said: I was talking about a 30/70 split in usage.
But FTR, even in the sense I intended, you’re right, the number 30/70 is wrong, or at least it can only be valid under specific conditions that I’m not really able to quantify (electricity mix, coverage of demand, etc), and I hadn’t thought it through a lot.
My comment was addressing the pre-conceived idea that nuclear is too costly to be a long term solution. (Which I’m actually not sure the original comment meant, heh...)
We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own.
Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high.
Roughly 83,000 metric tons.
Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment.
Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
Concrete and a train is the usual method.
Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume!
Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol.
With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel.
Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge.
The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will.
The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.
There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power.
(I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])
Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.
You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
Also, there are some reactor designs that can burn the waste we currently have, so we could get more energy and less waste.
It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent.
Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-gree...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-renewables-recor...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/29/solar-other-renewable...
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
If land cost ever did become significant globally for renewables then renewables will have already slaughtered the competition, by being cheaper by a huge factor.
If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you need e.g. 100GW for the peak load in the evening but only 50GW for twelve hours overnight.
That doesn't seem likely to be cheaper than using storage for only the differential load in the evening. But once you have storage there isn't any good reason not to use cheap solar for the daytime load differential, and to provide the energy to charge the storage for later in the day.
If storage does become cheap and available, then renewables could be cheaper depending on the price of land and capacity factor of the energy sources. But that's a question of if. We have nowhere near the amount of storage required and no solid plan for reaching the required scale. So it's a matter of burning fossil fuels until we're able to build out orders of magnitude more energy storage.
Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.
It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.
The Finnish Olkiluoto plant might go on line in 2022 and then it would have had a 22-year development time. Starting such a project today this would mean it finishes around 2040. And this was planned with "conventional" nuclear technology and knowing well all the difficulties such a construction entails. That would perhaps be in time to power a kind of cold house museum to show our children how Earth has been looking before runaway climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Proposing new technology which is sure to run longer smells to me a lot like to suggest doing nothing in order to avoid change that is both absolutely urgent, and totally possible now.
Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables.
Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid.
The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. The cost for renewables + storage is at least the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously a cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term and there are lots of methane losses in its capture and distribution. No one seriously thinks that natural gas is a long term answer to climate change.
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. If you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
Other projections have the economy basically decarbonizing (without needing nuclear) at a CO2 tax of just $200/ton.
There's a good reason Exelon is tryin to spin off all its NPPs.
Where did they say that?
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
I don't think we really know what a fair CO2 tax should be since it is hard to say what are the long term societal costs of an extra ton of CO2 in the atmosphere. (Though we will likely find out in the next 50 years.)
I am not sure the amount of subsidies that are given to wind, but the rationale for the CO2 tax idea seems to come from that:
>...Crane blamed the regulators of wholesale power markets for failing to give credit to nuclear generators for the social benefits of their carbon-free output. He and other executives say that it’s unfair to not provide nuclear generators a subsidy comparable to the tax credit that wind turbine operators receive for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they produce.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#History
That is a different discussion. France built France built over 50 reactors in about 15 years, so obviously a rapid buildup could be done if that ends up being the best option, but that is worthy of its own discussion.
My point was that there are advocates who only talk about the cost of nuclear power compared to say the low cost of solar electricity from solar cells in Arizona at noon. If we are going to only rely on wind/solar there are a lot of unknowns about how long term grid storage could work or the costs of over building of wind/solar that might have to be done, etc etc. Yea that all might just work out, but if it doesn't is it better to suffer an existential threat from climate change or use nuclear power? If people are opposed to nuclear power no matter the consequences, then they should just say that.
I think Bill Gates has the right approach here - he is investing in grid storage technologies AND investing in advanced nuclear plant designs.
There's this weird myth of "either or" here. People are treating money, labor, and materials as if they are these static things. This isn't a video game where if you need more pylons you just buy them. In reality we only have so many experts in a field at a time. We can't just solve fusion faster by throwing more money at it. There are diminishing returns after a point. So you use this money elsewhere. This weird myth of "either or" really comes down to thinking that everyone is stupid and "I'm an expert" (the "It's so simple, you just..."). I find this odd on a site full of tech nerds who have to frequently deal with these types of logistical issues and laymen making wildly naive conjectures.
This is why most plans for renewables are contingent on orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy storage. Or continued use of fossil fuels. Because if you use nuclear to fill in the duck curve, then there's no reason to build out other sources of energy.
If so, the renewable advocate should argue based on cost. Nuclear is very likely going to lose that argument, ultimately spurious arguments about energy density or intermittency notwithstanding.
Consumer rooftop solar might be the most highly subsidized form of power in the world, so yes it might be cost-effective for the people getting the subsidies - but that doesn't mean it is not expensive.
Rooftop grid-connected solar is a way to get the reliability benefit of being on the grid without having to pay your fair share of the cost of providing that reliability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake
The US east coast faces a tsunami risk from undersea avalanches on the edge of the continental shelf:
https://www.livescience.com/24813-east-coast-tsunamis.html
"An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet (8 meters), [...] Underwater canyons and bays could focus these waves and make them even bigger."
"A 7.2-magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1929 caused a large underwater landslide, creating a large wave that rushed ashore and killed 28 people on the island, ten Brink said. The waves were up to 26 feet high until some reached narrow inlets, where they grew to 43 feet (13 m), he said."
> An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet
Turbidity currents occur on the regular without earthquakes and rarely result in substantial waves. They have been observed to happen due to earthquakes, but this is a rare event. The Grand Banks quake is the only known earthquake to have done this, and as you pointed out it was an earthquake with a much larger magnitude.
In the grand scheme of things, turbidity events don't significantly impact the overall risk of tsunamis. The tsunami risk overwhelmingly comes from the earthquakes themselves, not the turbidity events they may trigger.
Like Tsunamis.
Do you know where Flamanville is situated? Right next to the Atlantic ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Why is "geographical independency" desirable here?
We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for almost every other product. Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? (#)
Intermittency is much easier solved geographically than temporally. Move energy instead of trying to store it for local use later. Self-sufficiency was necessary in medieval times because it was impossible to move large amounts of things fast and easy. We solved this problem and famines went away as well. Any famine you hear about today is not caused by logistics or unavailability of food in general but by political or societal problems.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission also exists. China has power lines that can transfer gigawatts over distances of thousands of kilometers. Today.
Losses of HVDC are roughly 3% per 1000km by the way, so it is not even that half of the energy is lost in the process.
(#) It actually is different in the regard that effects of lost or cut power (the latter in case of talking about a conflict) are more immediate than they are for most physical products. The latter are usually to some degree in transit or storage so production issues are not immediately felt. It feels like this problem can be solved by even more interconnectedness of power grids. (In Europe, more than a TW (Terawatt)of power sources and consumers are connected to the same grid already, even though a relatively low fraction of this power can be moved over larger distances at the moment.)
The examples you provided here really don't illustrate your point well because most of them are easily shipped across the ocean which is not at all true for energy.
A better counterargument would the suspicious number of wars, invasions and military bases involved in cross-country energy exchanges (ie, there is a lot of fighting over oil in the middle east). It seems remarkably foolish to source energy from territory controlled by a foreign military.
The SARS-NCoV-2 epidemic showed how brittle the worldwide supply chains really are. China is a production powerhouse, producing all kinds of everything, and everyone and their neighbour wants to produce in China, but unfortunately this had created a single point of failure. Once the virus stopped things in China, the disruption cascaded along the supply chain networks; demand existed but production was stopped.
Resiliency in supply chains won't happen through adding massive inventories to handle a months long disruption, instead it will happen by moving some of the production away from Asia back to USA, Europe, Great Britain, and so on.
Naturally bananas and corn won't get this treatment, but technological goods will.
I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. It is already an area of massive research. It is something we need to scale anyway due to electric cars. And it is very easy to deploy to the existing grid. You just need a concrete pad, some power gear, and a substation.
Being optimistic about nuclear does not mean we cannot be optimistic about batter storage.
I only need to look at how long my laptop lasts compared to 15 years ago.
That's not my issue. My issue is that we currently have working nuclear technology. That we can build and deploy now. Bullish means we're relying on future inventions. With the potential catastrophe we have ahead of us I don't think it is a good idea to put all our eggs in one basket. It may not pan out. It may not pan out in the timeframe we need it to. Nuclear is a relatively cheap risk reduction strategy. Be bullish on battery, but have a backup because in the mean time we're still using coal/oil/gas.
I dont doubt that we can build nuclear plants. But right now the number of nations that can actually pull it off is small. Changing that would require new tech, modularisation, mass production etc. That is great and we should do that. But will it happen quickly?
Well nuclear needs water, not a very strong constraint I agree but one nevertheless.
In France when it gets too hot they have to stop the nuclear plants since by environnement regulations they cannot pump out too hot water in the river.
By now offshore wind is still behind in capacity factor compared to nuclear but it's closer and closer.
For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1)
For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)
(1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor
(2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
2x nuclear plants with 50% capacity factor due to planned maintenance can work fine, one covers the other.
2x solar panels with 50% capacity factor due to night is a problem, because now something else is needed to deal with night-time power.
The disparity between peak energy load and minimal energy load is only ~25%. Excess energy is an easy problem to solve. Nuclear power plants' thermal output is largely fixed, but their electrical output can be modulated by more aggressive cooling. Basically, deliberately produce more waste heat. If this nuclear plant is on the coast it can use this waste heat for desalination - the waste heat gives you freshwater as a bonus.
But the same solution also makes solar interesting again when it's used in combination, because you can store heat from nuclear during the times when solar is generating and then use it during the times when it isn't.
If you remove fossil fuels, you have to replace them with something. You're building new power plants. New nuclear power plants could straightforwardly be built with thermal storage.
Nuclear plants definitely could use thermal storage, but the main advantage is of nuclear over renewables is that they have consistent energy production and thus don't need storage in the first place. It doesn't suffer from the duck curve like solar, or weather-dependent intermittency like wind. Nuclear doesn't need storage to become viable, as France has demonstrated for decades.
For one, it needs a cool river with lots of water available for cooling. Which with climate change is, even in the UK, becoming less ubiquitous than it was so far.
This is the worst argument I've ever read for renewables.
With renewable and storage, you need to build at the very least 7 times the capacity. Maybe as much as 40 times the capacity. Because of the low load factor, the fact that it's pretty common to have a full week without wind or without sun, etc.
Also, wave energy converters like Pelamis are an exciting technology, precisely because they harvest wind energy decoupled in space and time. It is a great opportunity for Scotland, the coast of France and Spain, Japan, Scandinavia and so on. Not totally technologically mature but shown to be viable using 400kW plants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3-SXFtPYe0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slawyq4PXxE
This is so fantastic. Makes my heart jump.
Our daily routines are so synchronized that we see these massives peaks everywhere. Not only in energy consumption but also in road use (congestion), commuting services (packed subway cars) or in super markets (low fraction of total available checkouts needed during most times of the day because their number was dimensioned for peak times). I'm sure you can find other examples if you think about it.
Flattening the demand over time by allowing to spread out daily routines (by not requiring or forbidding certain opening hours or office hours for example) so our infrastructure would not need to be dimensioned for these outsized peaks would be addressing the actual underlying issue. Building nuclear plants and more streets might be an easier task as the other would require personal and societal change ... and people are creatures of habit (which is something we should never underestimate).
If you remember the pro-nuclear argument at that time, hold on, it was "electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes".
That was simply a statement from the head of the AEC at a meeting with science writers along with a lot of other bold statements about the future:
>...It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.
>...A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future.[6] James Ramey, who would later become the AEC Commissioner, noted: "Nobody took Strauss' statement very seriously
I mentioned I'm skeptical, but I'm genuinely asking, because I've never seen anyone ask about it.
Large scale electricity storage other than hydro power doesn’t exist and is extremely unlikely to materialize anytime in the near future.
Some advocates of renewables argue that “Power2Gas” is an option but they completely underestimate the amount of energy large countries need to store.
In Germany, for example, the daily electricity consumption is 1600 GWh. Converting that into methane would require to produce 3.5 million gas trucks filled with methane - for just a day.
And Germany’s current total hydro capacity is about 40 GWh, so only 1/40 of what we need of storage for a single day.
I don’t see a future for 100% renewables other than for small countries like Norway, Austria or Iceland who have lots of mountains for hydro power but only a fraction of the population of Germany or even the US.
Using 2030 projections, nuclear loses.
(and that model doesn't take into account addressing intermittency with transmission or dispatchable demand, such as end-user thermal storage.)
As you imply here, it is not cheaper now, and plan something on hopes that it will be seems not very prudent.
Past performance is not indicative of future one.
We don't know what technical and engineering problems will surface when building battery packs orders of magnitude bigger than current biggest ones.
Investors are used to operating under uncertainty and placing their bets. The market, which reflects the combined input of all those investors, seems to think NPPs are not a good bet.
The technical issues of storage are unique to particular kinds of storage. There are many different kinds being pushed. Are you saying ALL of them are going to fail? That's a bold position, especially as cheap renewables make the environment more and more lucrative for anyone who can provide better storage technology. We're talking many trillions of dollars here, and the economic incentives will only get stronger as duck curves and CO2 taxes increase.
How many homes could you insulate for even a tenth of the cost of this project?
There are around 4 milion UK homes using electric storage heaters or ancient oil heating systems for starters.
Office blocks waste vast amounts of electricity on heating and cooling that could be reduced through tougher building regulations.
When energy cost of nuclear vs renewables is compared it's very common not only to forget about cost of storage and of additional generation capacity (including natural gas peak plants) required for renewables, but also to bring cost of nuclear based on the projects like ERP, not on the Russian/Chinese/Korean projects, which arguably have much more sensible and viable in long-term energy policy.
And actually Hinckley and Sizewell do fit within this model. They have been given very high strike prices and hopefully will be able to deliver a more cost effective pipeline of projects later on. But this approach is more difficult with large, monolithic projects.
1) LCOE notwithstanding is new nuclear good value / likely to be a low regrets investment?
2) Why have previous EPRs been delayed and over budget?
3) Why is HPC so expensive?
4) Is there evidence that HPC, the predecessor is likely to be on-time / on-budget?
5) Therefore is this likely to be a good decision?
The first one depends on whole-system modelling of energy systems cost. LCOE is fine for understanding the cost of a single point asset or of a low penetration technology, it doesn't incorporate balancing costs. The way you model this is you build a model that:
-Includes heat as well since the electrification of heat adds a substantial load of non temporally diversified, difficult to defer load. Basically when its cold, everyone wants to run their heat pumps and they will run them for weeks at a time)
-Includes transport (including V2G)
-Includes demand side response
-Includes storage (not including storage and DSR is not realistic and substantially escalates system costs)
-Operates at the long time resolution where investment decisions are made and at the short time resolution (stochastic unit commitment to dispatch available resources in an optimal way)
-Includes system stability constraints
-Includes transmission and distribution costs
-Generates physically plausible load/generation combinations, in other words if you're in Los Angeles you don't need to simulate what happens if it's blazingly hot on a February evening after a day where the sun hasn't shone because that doesn't happen.
You then impose a carbon constraint on your model and let it come up with an optimum generation mix and associated system cost for that constraint. If you want to know the system value of a particular technology, you manually increase or decrease it from the optimum level and determine the change in system cost (excluding the marginal cost of the manually changed technology). This gives you a set of marginal system values which you can compare with your LCOE to determine a curve for each technology, conditioned on all the other technologies and their costs in the system.
Some highlights from this research: (For reference, on an electricity only basis (IOW heat not included) France is 90g/kWh, UK is 220 down from 400 a few years ago, Germany is 400, Poland is 600, Denmark and Sweden are 50 or so.
-For shallow decarbonisation, down to about 100g/kWh, you don't need nuclear or CCS. Optimum systems are Wind/Solar/Battery/DSR/gas. -Down to 50g/kWh you just run your gas less frequently and need more battery technology. (Or if you have massive hydro you can down to this level with fewer batteries). The cost of batteries has a big impact on total system costs and there are plausible battery cost forecasts where this system is less expensive than most current power systems even without accounting for the costs to the climate.
-For deep decarbonisation, going down from 50 to 0, the system cost without nuclear or CCS goes up very rapidly. That's because above this point you're keeping your existing gas capacity around, just using it less. That requires a tariff mechanism to pay for capacity as well as energy but that's easily solved and in many places exist already. Below this point, even running your gas for a few weeks during winter peaks blows your budget. You therefore need to either:
--Build a lot more batteries, except now they're not being diurnally cycled but used for longer term storage which makes them way more expensive per kWh
--Overbuild renewables so that even when there is very little power produced from them it gets you through an overcast and windless period. This leaves you dumping excess power the rest of the year. There are groups who argue that if we did this, our economy would adapt to find a use for the excess power, which I'm sympathetic to. You need about 4x current peak in nameplate renewables capacity and a lot of batteries to do it in a heat-not-included scenario. This overbuild scenario is the one the models select and the cost is high because the model assumes excess power is wasted.
--Build nuclear or CCS, not necessarily a lot, but some. This is a little-goes-a-long-way type deal.
The system value of Hinckley Point C comes out as being between £80 and £150 / MWh, depending on when you assume the rest of the UK's AGRs will come offline. Remember that these are curves rather than points so its not a matter of this justifying infinite more nuclear at that point but determining the system difference between having a small amount of nuclear and none.
On that basis, the agreed strike price of £93 / MWh is high and difficult to justify on purely commercial basis but remember that long-term government decision making should be based on keeping pathways open and minimising regret. I think it was just about justifiable but I accept that with different assumptions about technology cost curves it might be suboptimal.
This report is a good read and was generated using my favourite model (my second favourite is the MIT GenX model but last time I checked that one doesn't do system operational constraints like reserve and frequency stability): https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2018/12/value_of_...
Essentially EDF and Areva thought that since they were French and operated lots of nuclear power stations, they knew how to build them. This was wrong. You’re probably familiar with First of a Kind (FoaK) but there is also such a thing as First in a While. They made a number of mistakes early on in the EPR programme. (For reference, there have been six plants EPRs where construction has started. In order: Olkiluoto in Finland, Flamanville in France, Taishan 5 and 6 in China, HPC 1 and 2 in the UK) Sizewell would be numbers 7 and 8.
A brief aside on over-budget and over-time here. These are the same thing on complicated major infrastructure projects. Virtually all the costs are labour costs and these are all specialised skills so when they’re not working, you don’t just tell the contractors to go work on something else, you need to pay them the whole time they’re mobilised. A schedule delay = being over budget.
Most significant was the start of Olkiluoto construction before the detailed design was done. Starting construction before detailed design is very common in construction and it’s really more of a balancing act than a binary decision but in this case it was a very bad idea. There were substantial periods of time where thousands of people were being well paid to do nothing while Areva and other partners were working out design issues that held up the build.
Second was some absolutely unforgivable fuckery going on at the main forging works in France. The biggest single item in a PWR reactor is the forged pressure vessel which is made in enormous pieces, these pieces are then painstakingly welded together – each weld may take 100 passes in between each the weld is examined, cleaned, and the work pieces are heated up. There were documents being forged about quality control, really really bad stuff. As a result, the Flamanville vessel lid needs to be replaced very early in its life since it has defects that mean it will not last the 80 year design lifetime.
Third, there are non-up-to-specification welds in the main cooling lines at Flamanville, they’re in a place that is no longer reachable and so EDF has had to develop custom welding robots to fix them.
The two Chinese plants were somewhat late but not so over-budget. Part of the reason for that is China has a big nuclear construction programme so as soon as they needed to halt while a design issue was worked out, they sent all their nuclear qualified on-site staff to work on other projects.
Third: why is the agreed strike price for HPC so high?
First, the capital cost is high. The estimated capex was based on the cost it actually took to build Flamanville and Oikiluoto at least the latter of which has actually been built properly and is now entering final commissioning. That does mean that the capex estimate is more accurate than the much lower costs estimated before construction started on those plants.
Second, the strike price accounts for the entire construction risk sitting with EDF.
Third, EDF has had to finance the whole cost itself. If you built the same project using government borrowing costs the project would be much cheaper. (However this is an economically problematic view since government borrowing costs being low relies on a risk transfer to citizens, a matter on which I disagree with the National Audit Office).
Fourth: How’s HPC construction going?
So far, very well. The second unit is being built faster and more cheaply (remember – same thing) than the first. The timing is such that if you want to get maximum nth of a kind savings from building Sizewell C, you need to make a decision soon so that you can organise moving staff from one to the other. It is worth noting that econometric studies of nuke construction costs have shown that series building saves a huge amount of money so it would actually make no sense for the UK to build any non-EPR designs unless they have radically different characteristics like SMRs to justify it.
Finally: is it therefore the right decision to build Sizewell C?
Honestly. I do not 100% know and I am deeply suspicious of anyone who does. They either know more about it / have thought about it more than I have, and of course I accept that there are people who do and have. Or… they haven’t but are nonetheless sure of their position. My leaning is that long term government thinking should be aimed at actions that are near-optimal / low-regret in the greatest number of cases. Given the uncertainties around CCS as an alternative and the actual climate impact of methane leakage on the way to the CCS plant, the absolute over-riding-everything need to deal with our emissions and to do so as fast as we can, and the long construction time scales, I think it probably is the right decision to build at least this plant.
A decision on a third two-unit EPR does not need to be made until later and at that point we will know more about future technology developments. It may be that at that point we realise that not only do we not need a third but that we didn’t really need Sizewell and HPC either and therefore we will have spent more by 2050 to decarbonise than was optimal. Totally possible! The objective though is not to optimise in a fragile way but to create as many somewhat-optimal pathways as possible.
(disclosures: I make part of my income from working on wind, solar, battery and lately hydrogen projects. I've never worked on a nuclear project.)
The nuclear fanboys still push the big reactors. I think renewable fans like me favor next gen rectors because we are okay with not building reactors right away. We can build renewables until they are developed. Nuclear fans OTOH hate renewables and just want to build whatever is possible right now.
So we are in a situation where nuclear fans are not pushing it and most renewable fans think all nuclear power is like the current shitty big reactors.
Another problem is nuclear fanboys: why exactly do they hate renewables so much ?
Where do people think all that nuclear waste goes?
Compared with the certainty of carbon-induced climate catastrophe, I'll take the risk of nuclear any day.